Linda's Marketing Leverage Blog

Astia Efforts Pay Off

As a coach, mentor and member of the Technology Review Board of Astia, the accelerator for women-led startups, I am really pleased to be able to share this recent news release highlighting the success of companies participating in Astia's most recent entrepreneurial venture conference last fall.

It was my pleasure to work with one of the companies mentioned in the release, Scout Labs,  a web-based service that helps companies tune into the voice of the customer across the web and turns that information into actionable insight to drive business growth.Talk about a great idea in the right place at the right time. And since they were funded right after the Astia conference, obviously other people thought so as well.

If you would like to interact with some of the hottest companies in the market and support a great cause too, I recommend getting involved with Astia in the future. They are always looking for volunteers to share their expertise with the next generation of entrepreneurs.

How the Book Began

Now that my Handbook, Marketing Your Career: Positioning, Packaging and Promoting Yourself for Success has been published and is available, I thought I'd reflect on the process I went through to conceive and deliver this project.

Birth seems to be an appropriate metaphor, because there really is a conception, gestation and then delivery process. Unlike having a child, though, this process isn't guaranteed to be over in 9 months. Sometimes it can take a whole lot longer to get from Point A to Point B, and sometimes, just as in real life, there are writing efforts that don't quite make it the whole way through the process.

In my case, there was about a two year process from when I decided I would write a full book to when I finally said, we're not getting anywhere--let's go at this another way. Last spring, after a discussion with my mentor Alan Weiss, I decided to create a series of shorter works instead.

The idea would be to take some of the key concepts in my Leverage2Market Model and create shorter booklets (which evolved into handbooks) as a first step in creating published works. The initial topic was a natural one: Take the material that had been so well received in my articles and workshops on Marketing Product YOU and evolve it into a guide to help professionals better market the ultimate product offering, themselves. From that point, the path to the final product was a bit circuitous and included a long discussion about whether this material was better suited to marketers in particular or professionals in general. (Arguments on both sides were compelling--I finally decided to be more inclusive and talk more generally to a broad professional audience.)

I also learned that writing a book is only a small subset of what's required to get a book published. The publishing process in itself has been an incredible learning experience. Look for more posts on this topic in the coming weeks.

What's interesting to me is that just like with a real life child, people tell me the book looks great and ask when I'm going to do the next one. Right now we're just recovering from the first one. Stay tuned

Those Pesky Little Fuel Surcharges

Very high on my list of Pet Peeves of how to irritate a customer: Add a surcharge to your bill for oil, gas, delivery, etc. because the price of fuel has gone up.

Excuse me, but when oil is $100 a barrel, it impacts everyone. So not only has your cost gone up, but so have the costs of your customers and the people who work for you. Yet most of us don't go around adding "fuel surcharges" to our invoices.

The cost of delivering your product is part of your cost of doing business. If you've priced your product appropriately, you shouldn't have to tack on these irritating little surcharges.

Besides, when was the last time a company gave you a fuel credit because the price of fuel went down?  Instead, these charges become a permanent part of the invoices and another way for companies to generate revenue.

If you're going to charge me for these types of things, at least have the courtesy to credit me for all the things I do that help save you money (starting with the fact that it costs less to keep and grow an existing customer than to have to go out and market to get new business).

Or deep six the surcharges.

They Still Just Don't Get It: Arrowhead Water

Last year Arrowhead Water informed me that they were making my home water deliveries less frequent to accommodate their needs, not mine. They would also give me more water bottles to make sure I was covered for the longer duration, which, to me, looked like a way to push more product to the customer.

This month an insert in my bill tells me that starting immediately they have a minimum purchase requirement for deliveries. So now, not only are deliveries less often, but I'm also required to buy more. Is this supposed to be improved customer service?

Perhaps someone should tell Arrowhead (and their corporate parent Nestle) that they ought to be working harder to convince me to buy their products--not making it more difficult. Today's customers know they have a myriad of options to choose from--including no longer buying bottled water but using tap water instead to be environmentally conscious. So shouldn't suppliers be taking care of *me* the customer, instead of *them* the supplier?

This strategy is pretty washed up to me.